Brendan Shanahan, who helped define the role of power forward, should have been elected last year. / Paul Sancya, AP

by Kevin Allen, USA TODAY Sports

by Kevin Allen, USA TODAY Sports

In this era when second-guessing is second nature to us all and criticizing Hall of Fame selections has become another national past-time, it might be major news that the Hockey Hall of Fame selection committee got right in 2013.

Scott Niedermayer and Chris Chelios, two defensemen with vastly different playing styles, should have been ushered into the Hall in their first year of eligibility and they were. Brendan Shanahan should have been in last year, and that was corrected.

The late Fred Shero's absence from the Hall of Fame long has been listed as one of the Hall's biggest mistakes. The selection committee also fixed that problem.

It was surprising that Chelios was home alone when he was told he had been elected because he always rode with a posse in his playing days.

Chelios is in the Hall of Fame because he was one of the best ever to play at that position. He was skilled, durable, cunning and ruthless. This is a man who was still playing at age 48. His workouts sometimes included riding an exercise bike in the sauna.

Dallas Stars general manager Jim Nill, who worked for the Detroit Red Wings for many years, told me once about coming to Joe Louis Arena one morning when the team was on the road and finding Chelios on the ice several days after knee surgery.

There was not a soul around, no one to see the effort he was putting in. That's who Chelios was as an athlete.

Despite his prowess as a player, what players remember most about Chelios is what an popular teammate he was. He was always the team's social director, always looked after the younger players and veterans. His personality brought teams together.

He is still considered the original Godfather of the American program. When the American teams gathered for international competition, everyone gravitated to Chelios. No one wore the U.S. sweater prouder.

When NHL players would gather would for Olympic orientation camps, they would start out filling out paperwork. And there would be nods and polite banter each time a new NHLer would show up. But when Chelios entered the room with his friends, it was like the party officially started. Several prominent players, Mike Modano, Keith Tkachuk, Jeremy Roenick and others, rose out of their seats to greet him We can imagine that reaction was similar to what you would have seen when Frank Sinatra walked into into a Las Vegas club in the 1960s.

On the ice, Chelios played the game like he was re-enacting a scene from Braveheart. When you look at his statistics, you have to look at goals, assists and stitches.

Niedermayer, by contrast, played the game with artistry and flair. One of the more magnificent skaters in NHL history, he had the ability to turn the game with an end-to-end rush.

One of the more fascinating aspect of Niedermayer's speed was that he never appeared to be going as fast as he really was. Paul Coffey always looked like he was going 100 mph, while Niedermayer always looked like he was going 60 mph when he was really going 100 mph. Opponents were all keenly aware of Niedermayer's skating ability, and yet it always seemed as if he was catching them off guard.

Chelios was often mouthy in his career, not afraid to rock the boat. His mouth got him into trouble more than once. His bad boy image was part of his charm.

By contrast, Niedermayer seemed like the choir boy. He always stayed classy, always said the right things. He was soft-spoken. It was like he was born to play for the buttoned-up Lou Lamoriello in New Jersey.

Shanahan deserved to get into the Hall of Fame in his first crack last season. No one is quite sure why that didn't happen. When you count both his regular-season and playoff goals, he has more than 700.

When he came into the NHL in late 1980s, Shanahan helped define the modern power forward. The league had always had power forwards, but in that era, the NHL began to celebrate the value of the rugged forward who could score, hit and fight.

Red Wings forward Darren McCarty said recently that Shanahan's arrival in Detroit was one of the most important factors in the Red Wings winning back-to-back titles in 1997 and 1998.

McCarty said Shanahan taught Martin Lapointe and him how to be smart of using their physical play and schooled them how to be better goal scorers.

Shanahan had 17 Gordie Howe hat tricks (goal, assist, fight) in his career, 15 more than Gordie actually had. Shanahan played nine seasons in Detroit, and scored 46 goals in his first season in a Red Wings jersey and 40 in his last. That's consistency.

The selection committee's decision to admit Shero was long overdue. We never will know for sure why each selection committee through the years ignored Shero.

We can guess that the Broad Street Bullies' fighting ways offended people, and voters couldn't separate coach Shero from the mayhem of that era.

But the truth is that the eccentric, innovative Shero was ahead of his time in the way he viewed the game. He is credited with starting the trend of coaches having assistants. Shero was fascinated with Europeans long before it was fashionable in the NHL.

Former NHL coach Lou Vairo tells a funny story of running into Shero at a coaching clinic in Moscow in the 1970s and the two of them standing in a long line to secure their morning coffee from a street vendor.

When they got to the front of the line more than an hour later, they discovered the woman was selling root vegetables, not coffee.

But Vairo said it's one the best hours he ever spent because he got to talk hockey with Shero.

Hockey was a conformist sport in those days, and Shero thought outside the box. It was his way to be different. This year, it was the selection committee that was different. It finally give Shero the acclaim he deserved.

Here's hoping the group feels the same way next next year. It can fix another wrong by putting the late Pat Burns into the Hall of Fame.